Dingoonity.org turns one! Now if this isn’t a reason to celebrate?! Hail the Dingoo!

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Today marks one year since Dingoonity first launched these boards. It has been a great year, and since day 1 the community has grown in leaps and bounds.

I’d like to thank all the people that have made the community what it is:

The board staff — Harteex, Congozombie, Quadomatic, codiak, Rebelphoenix, zear, Shred, qbertaddict, Kronus, eule, blizz, xdpirate

The developers for Dingoo native and Dingux (There are too many to list here, so I won’t, but if you spend some time in either of the release boards for these platforms you’ll spot some regular names!)

And most importantly you — each of you that comes to the site every day, or every-other-day, and actively takes part in the community.

We’ve got nearly 2000 registered members on the board right now, and at any time there are usually 5x as many guest users as registered browsing the board – you can view some more board stats here – http://boards.dingoonity.org/stats/

The first year of Dingoonity

Dingoonity began on/around October 14th 2009. An already popular Dingoo community (the a320.freeforums.org board) had some problems with one of their staff members deciding to destroy the forum, and many members who were on IRC (#dingoo-a320 on irc.freenode.net), including myself, had decided that such an unstable place for a forum wasn’t a good place — so we started a new hosted board – Dingoonity.

From the 14th-16th I worked tirelessly to setup the boards and this botched board design that you see before you now (which has changed marginally since launch).

Initially we had a WordPress powered news page — but after some suggestions, on the 21st of October I decided it would be best to integrate it better with the boards — so I built the current news page which is now powered by the news board.

Since then new sub-boards have been added, things have been changed here and there (such as the introduction of friendly URLs) and all the time the community has continued to grow.

Earlier this year I added some sub-boards for some other devices, such as the Ben Nanonote, and SPMP8000-based devices.

From the start I’ve wanted to not run paid adverts on the site, as it’s one thing I personally can’t stand — but in September this year, I decided to add a Google Adsense banner for guests to the page footer, and for members on the unread posts page in the footer. These have been appropriately unobtrusive, and seem to be generating enough money to cover the hosting.

The next year of Dingoonity

The community seems just as active now as it has been all year — there’s always some great stuff happening for Dingoo native and Dingux development.

I’ll get around to finishing up and releasing the new board design at some point I’m sure, perhaps before Dingoonity’s 2nd birthday!

We’ve got an active channel on IRC (#Dingoonity on irc.freenode.net) which continues to have 25-30 people online at any moment — it’s a great place with lots of development-based discussion going on, people asking questions and others providing helpful feedback, and also lots of off-topic talk.

http://boards.dingoonity.org/announcements/dingoonity-turns-1-year-old!/

ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!

Some of the adventures ScummVM supports include Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution’s Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; Wyrmkeep’s Inherit the Earth; Coktel Vision’s Gobliiins; Westwood Studios’ The Legend of Kyrandia and games based on LucasArts’ SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system such as Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more. You can find a thorough list with details on which games are supported and how well on the compatibility page. ScummVM is continually improving, so check back often.

General release notes:

CABAL (Coalesced ‘Adventures beyond Architecture’ League) finally came alive, and now for real. Yes, truly, it took us just 6.5 years, and today we are eagerly announcing that a universal adventure game interpreter, playing SCUMM, AGI, and SCI games has been released.

From now on, it is available on ScummVM’s downloads page (Look for version 1.2.0). You may jump straight there, or stay a bit longer and see what cool new features are included.

As you have probably already realized, this release has support for SCI, and moreover, the list of compatible games goes beyond the original FreeSCI which was merged about 1.5 years ago. We support Conquests of Camelot/the Longbow, Castle/Island of Dr. Brain, Codename: ICEMAN, EcoQuest 1&2, all four Hoyle games, Freddy Pharkas, Jones in the Fast Lane, King’s Quest I-VI, both Laura Bow games, Larry up to 6 (low-res 6 only), Police Quest 1-3, Quest for Glory I-III, Space Quest up to V and a few others. Incredible work by the FreeSCI team and our own SCI engine team!

Early SCI 16-color games can be optionally undithered by ScummVM, making them look much better. To see a comparison between undithered graphics and the original, watch this video produced by one of our SCI engine developers and see for yourself.

Besides SCI, we have added support for yet another Coktel Vision game called Fascination and we have a number of new ports: Android, Dingux, Caanoo and OpenPandora. Unfortunately we had to declare the PalmOS port officially dead.

As usual there are tons of engine-specific bug fixes. Take a look at the release notes if you want to know more. But wait! We would like to tell a little bit about another long-awaited feature new in this release. After all these years we are finally going international, and the ScummVM GUI can be translated into any language (well, almost any). Right now we have Catalan, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian localizations. Besides this there are a lot of smaller improvements like tooltips, radio buttons, improved usability and we support more games running from original media without the need to shuffle the game files.

Enough talking! Now it is time to download ScummVM and start playing!

Changes:

1.2.0 (2010-10-15)

New Games:
– Added support for Fascination.

New Games (Sierra SCI0 – SCI1.1):
– Added support for Castle of Dr. Brain (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Codename: ICEMAN.
– Added support for Conquests of Camelot.
– Added support for Conquests of the Longbow (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus.
– Added support for EcoQuest 2: Lost Secret of the Rainforest.
– Added support for Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist.
– Added support for Hoyle’s Book of Games 1.
– Added support for Hoyle’s Book of Games 2.
– Added support for Hoyle’s Book of Games 3 (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Hoyle Classic Card Games.
– Added support for Jones in the Fast Lane.
– Added support for King’s Quest I (SCI remake).
– Added support for King’s Quest IV (SCI version).
– Added support for King’s Quest V (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for King’s Quest VI (low and hi res).
– Added support for Laura Bow: The Colonel’s Bequest.
– Added support for Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon Ra.
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 1 (SCI remake) (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 2.
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 3.
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 5 (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 6 (low res).
– Added support for Mixed-up Fairy Tales.
– Added support for Mixed-up Mother Goose.
– Added support for Pepper’s Adventures in Time.
– Added support for Police Quest I (SCI remake).
– Added support for Police Quest II.
– Added support for Police Quest III (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Quest for Glory I/Hero’s Quest.
– Added support for Quest for Glory I VGA remake.
– Added support for Quest for Glory II.
– Added support for Quest for Glory III.
– Added support for Slater & Charlie go camping.
– Added support for Space Quest I (SCI remake) (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Space Quest III.
– Added support for Space Quest IV (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Space Quest V.
– Added support for The Island of Dr. Brain.

New Ports:
– Added Android port.
– Added Dingux port.
– Added Caanoo port (based on the GP2XWiz port).
– Added OpenPandora port.

General:
– Removed the outdated PalmOS port.
– Switched to the “fast” DOSBox OPL emulator.
– Fixed a crash in the rjp1 player code affecting the FOTAQ Amiga version.
– Added support for more original media layouts.
– Added support for GUI localization.
– Improved GUI by adding tooltips and radiobuttons.
– Improved GUI usability by hiding more irrelevant options not supported by specific games.

AGI:
– Fixed number of GFX glitches.
– Made PIC drawing code picture perfect.
– Added support of MIDI devices.
– Added support for accurate Tandy sound emulation. Switched to it as default.

Broken Sword 2
– Fixed missing speech in some cutscenes.
– Fixed a memory leak that would eventually cause the game to hang. (#2976008 – BS2: Game lockup in British Museum)

Drascula:
– Fixed number of GFX glitches.
– Made many cutscenes smoother.
– Changed behavior of items menu. Now it shows up on mouse up.

Groovie:
– Added support for the Macintosh version of The 7th Guest.
– Added support for custom MT-32 instruments.

KYRA:
– Fixed some minor graphical glitches.
– Implemented formerly missing recreation of some in game items.
– Added support for playing Kyrandia 3 with the original CD file layout.

LURE:
– Fixed bug where Goewin could get stuck in the Weregate
– Fixed issue with Ratpouch repeatedly moving between two rooms
– Fix for Goewin losing her schedule after Were-cave
– Fix for player getting stuck in sewer exit room

Parallaction:
– Made part one of The Big Red Adventure completable.

SAGA:
– Fixed graphics glitches in several scenes.

SCUMM:
– Several improvements in Maniac Mansion NES.

PSP port:
– New backend design: fixed minor graphical issues and enabled 16-bit support.
– Enabled playback of MP3 files using the Media Engine. This means that the port is optimized for MP3 files (as opposed to OGG).
– Many optimizations. Everything should run faster.

Wii port:
– Added support for USB2 mass storage devices (requires The Homebrew Channel >= v1.0.8 with IOS58).

GameCube port:
– Added support for DVDs with the ISO9660 file system.

GP2X port:
– Added support for dynamic engine plugins (experimental).
– Reworked control system and better touchscreen support.

GP2XWiz/Caanoo port:
– Improved downscale code to minimise ‘tearing’ corruption.
– Reworked control system and better touchscreen support.
– Renamed backend from GP2XWIZ to GPH to better reflect the supported devices.

http://www.scummvm.org/downloads/

RockBot is supposed to become a multi-platform action game and borrows elements from Capcom’s Megaman.

Changes:

Fully playable (if you do not hit a bug) 8 stages and final boss.
Music for all stages and bosses.
More sound effects such as shot reflection.
Player death – after dead first time, you become half-invulnerable; makes easier for testing, will be removed on next version.
Sprites for all bosses.
Better artificial inteligence for NPCs and bosses.
Weapons for all bosses – for testing, you do not need to defeat the boss to try it.
Scaled window for Windows and Linux, as 320×200 is very small in a computer monitor.
Better menu – can leave pressing attack button now.
Water terrain and fixes on stairs and colision.
Port for Dingoo (Dingux).

http://rockbot.upperland.net/?p=500&lang=en

TecnoBallz is a exciting Brick Breaker with 50 levels of game and 11 special levels, distributed on the 2 modes of game to give the player a sophisticated system of attack weapons with an enormous power of fire that can be build by gaining bonuses. Numerous decors, musics and sounds complete this great game. This game was ported from the Commodore Amiga.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/dingoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,27,449

SDLInvaders is a game inspired by the arcade classic Space Invaders written using SDL.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/dingoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,27,447

Herdless Sheep is absolutely useless and painfully slow application for generating ‘flame fractals’ aka sheeps.

http://boards.dingoonity.org/dingux-releases/a-herdless-sheep

Super Mario War is a Super Mario multiplayer game. The goal is to stomp as many other Marios as possible to win the game. It’s a tribute to Nintendo and the game Mario War by Samuele Poletto.

The game uses artwork and sounds from Nintendo games. The authors hope that this noncommercial fangame qualifies as fair use work. They just wanted to create this game to show how much they adore Nintendo’s characters and games.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/dingoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,35,374

MKReader – program for reading text files (in codepage CP1251) for Dingux.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/dingoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,113,434

uNGP is a NeoGeo Pocket emulator for Dingoo under Dingux.

Changes:

Supported Compress format Zip, Rar, 7z and Gz.
– Now 3 video modes: Normal, Scaled Height, Fit to screen.
– Solved some bugs in menu and filemanager code.
– Added AutoFire. set Value 0 = Off, and value is the interval between fire and fire.
– Some changes in blitter code.
– Added save, load and reset config.
– Some code clean up.
– Experimental TV-Out option in Misc Submenu.
– Profiled compiled version.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/dingoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,71,431

BubsyMOD is a small ProTracker player written in SDL.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/dingoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,25,426